The Cost of a £1 Bucket (by sarah)

One of Barbaras buckets had found its self lodged in the trout pond behind our house - how it got there is something of a debate. Barbara had asked Alaric to retrieve said bucket early afternoon yesterday whilst he was dealing with something on the van in preparation for us going to the bank, so he said he would putting it on his list of jobs to do that day.

Barbara went out for her meeting and due to work running late Al started his outside jobs after she'd left. These where mowing a section of lawn and retrieving the bucket. Dad asked if he needed any help and Al said it would be great if Dad could don the waders and retrieve the bucket. Then they noticed the bucket was no longer in the trout pond - obviously it had washed over the little water fall there and gone behind our house.

Normally such things get lodged in the weir but no bucket so dad began to wade upstream in search of the bucket. But alas, no sign of the bucket was there and just as he began routing around the bushes right by the water fall of the trout pond a swarm of insects started really attacking him but he tried to ignore them thinking the bucket must be stuck in the bushes. Anyway in trying to swat away the midges and fight the bush he accidentally knocked his glasses off of his face - splash.

Straight in the water - he spent about an hour and a half searching for them with a magnetic poky stick Al has. Dad needs glasses to drive and needs to get back to Essex by Thursday morning for a hospital appointment. This meant he was refusing to get out of the stream and eat his dinner - in the end I got in the stream to look for them and sent him inside.

I found bits of old barbed wire so rusted the barbs are no longer evident, bits of hinges, old nails, bits of very rusty squashed cylindrical metal, a galvanized steel sheet and a bracket but no glasses. To be fair on the magnet we have no idea what exactly the frames or screws where made out of so were sort of just hoping they were going to be magnetic.

Unfortunatley the cold water though it numbed my foot and acted like the cold treatment I've been doing to bring the bruise out did mean that I painfully collided with not only the bank of the stream down on the green house corner where it gets deep but also in the house when I first came in - mainly due to the fact my mother had moved our fold-up tables legs to get access to the window over the stream - she had put them across the path straight into the kitchen - I wasn't expecting them to be there and did not see them (I blame the stinking cold I have which is Jeans fault, which is dads fault, which is Mr Mike's fault which is Seb's fault and so on). Pain ouch - my poor right foot its really taking a bashing at the moment.

Anyway we had all just given up and retreated inside the house for warm drinks and Al had taken me upstairs to try and see if we could strap my ankle up but the bruising is just too bad for me to allow it too happen - it was at this point my art teacher walked in in his wellies saying he'd just trodden on his glasses (well actually he came to say he could pick me up and take me to my class as he turns out to be one of my neighbours but then he mentioned his glasses :/ ). He then had a drink with us and offered to look in the stream as well - so off he went wading through the stream in search of the glasses - at no point had anyone seen the bucket.

The art teacher left and then Barbara came home and I told her what had happened and then found out the missing bucket had been retrieved by her that afternoon because Al had taken too long over it and she considered it an urgent job. So the £1 bucket that cost a pair of glasses, my white trousers getting mucky, lots of time and one even more screwed up ankle was in fact not missing at all and already rescued rendering the whole fasade completely and utterly useless.

I knew it was going to be a bad day when one of the first things I did was hit my forehead on the corner of the old metal vice/clamp whilst trying to move a pot of paint. I blame the cold.

Smelly Cat (by sarah)

Poor Minni has been getting abit smelly and then I noticed that her bottom looked a bit odd and she kept cleaning it all the time. She was also beating up the poor kittens and turned out to be prime suspect for poor Heliums injuries last week.

I picked her up to look at her properlly and lo! She appeared to be leaking the brown stuff which was to say the least skuzzy plus it had me worried - I thought she might be having a prolapse and got very unhappy as I thought she was going to have to be put down.

Al took her to the vet this morning and much to our relief it was an infected anal gland so after some rough prodding/cleaning out of the gland by the vet (resulting in icky brown slime) and some antibiotics injected into the infected area she seems quiet happy and far more even tempered than she has of late.

The down side is that obviously this was another £30 odd quid and she is going to have scar tissue there making her more prone to this sort of infection in the future :/

Still all in all we now no longer have a Smelly Cat!

Public Key Cryptography (by alaric)

Last night, I somehow managed to pull off the first ORG key signing event successfully!

We exchanged proofs of identity - the ostensible purpose of the event. And the ORG people spread the word about ORG to everyone who attended (and even at least one random person who came up and asked what we were doing), and we all had good discussions about digital rights and crypto.

One topic that came up was the one us cryptogeeks rarely worry about too much:

Why bother?

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I’ve finally started cabling my house (by alaric)

In our house, the telephone sockets are downstairs, at one end of the building, while my office (where my office telephone and computers sit) is upstairs and at the opposite end of the building.

So to get working quickly amongst the hubbub of moving in, I ran Ethernet and telephone cables from the phone sockets (the ADSL router that provides our Internet connection sits rights by the phone sockets, since the DSL signal quality is so bad anyway I wanted to maximise signal strength by not putting the ADSL router on the end of a cheap telephone extension cable) up to the office. The longest Ethernet cables I had were ten metres long, so I put the core router in the airing cupboard, more or less exactly between the phone sockets and my desk, and also conveniently having a power outlet to run it - then ran a ten-metre cable to it from the ADSL router and another one from my desk.

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Back to the Pain Clinic (by sarah)

Today found me at Stroud Hospital again this time to see a pain consultant like the people I was seeeing pre-Jean at Chelsea and Westmister. I am getting a new tens machine and some acupuncture (after alot of rechecking that I wasnt still on blood thinners - not sure where they got that idea from) and my pain monitored by someone at Gloucester, there are alos more meds I can try but due to stomache issues etc... we decided to try non-drug method but it is good to know there are still more options open to me including a chilli cream and an medication usually used for epileptics (alters nural activity which can be useful in getting rid of pain as well as controlling epilepsy - they had to do the whole be laboured - we are not saying you are epileptic thing incase I was stupid wwhich to be far I was doing a good impression of being stupid as I found I couldn't remeber what I had been prescribed in the past for my back :/).

The anti-inflamitry I had been using is not ok to use long term even with the stomach liner and would make me sick. I am again on daily paracetamol though - they say as long as I stick to the max dosage or below I should be fine.

Again the death knell - they can not do anything about the 'crepitous' and I am stuck with these injuries for the rest of my life but they can alliviate the pain and reduce the muscle tension which is actually cuasing most of the pain.

My pelvis was examined too which including squuzing my hips together - this has since caused a reassurgance of the clicking and I thought my right leg was going to explode from the pain about 20 minutes after the examination. This is apparently my hormones fualt and how they are settiling down 🙁

My wrist, stomache and other sundry things are being considered low priority as I am mostly looking after Jean and we are not dependent on money I earn. Again concerns where voiced about going to London on a regular basis for my MRes so I explained that a)it would be part time and b)I can do alot of it via distance learning. Apparently they can't inject the shoulder as its not the actual ball joint thats affected but rather underneith the shoulder blade (as I have been saying for years) - the lack of injection makes me sad though as that worked so well on my upper spine and after being told they would not opperate was my one big hope.

I really really hope this acupuncture works but have to confess that I'm a bit scared as I think of it as lots of needles being stuck into the skin - I have no idea if this is actually the case and even if it is I shall give it ago.

In the mean time I am to carry on managing things as I have been ie my physio excersises and hot baths and pillows in odd places to help me sleep.